I had a Thinkpad with Ubuntu and still had many of the problems you mention and more:
- Barely ever waking from sleep, especially with external monitor connected
- Screen brightness keyboard controls didn't work (needed to use a CLI tool to control gamma as a hacky workaround)
- Had to power cycle repeatedly to get to a desktop when booting
- Not working reliably in clamshell mode
- Randomly forgetting external monitor scaling
- Accessibility features like screen zooming are very poorly done compared to Mac's Ctrl-MouseWheel (which zooms entire screen without crashing)
Things actually got worse as I upgraded to newer kernels. The wake from sleep problem is the #1 productivity killer I had. I had to leave the machine running all the time just to do my job.
Sleep has become less of an issue recently, at least in my experience. Modern laptop CPUs idle in such a low power state. I just set up my built-in display to disable when the lid is closed. Seems sufficient.
If you leave it anywhere in a bag not plugged in, then you have to be constantly thinking 'I only have 30 hours left till the battery dies and I lose everything I had open'.
I'm not 30 hours away from electricity very often, to the point where it wouldn't be a big deal to just save and shutdown, since it is a rare occasion. But I live a very predictable lifestyle, I guess if you are exploring London you probably end up in unexpected situations often.
- Barely ever waking from sleep, especially with external monitor connected
- Screen brightness keyboard controls didn't work (needed to use a CLI tool to control gamma as a hacky workaround)
- Had to power cycle repeatedly to get to a desktop when booting
- Not working reliably in clamshell mode
- Randomly forgetting external monitor scaling
- Accessibility features like screen zooming are very poorly done compared to Mac's Ctrl-MouseWheel (which zooms entire screen without crashing)
Things actually got worse as I upgraded to newer kernels. The wake from sleep problem is the #1 productivity killer I had. I had to leave the machine running all the time just to do my job.
A good post on why Linux has so much trouble waking is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25386605